Since the beginning of history, leadership has been gaining a lot of attention. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tze was writing about it 2,500 years ago and due to the timelessness of his ideas, his work is still referred to.
The main characteristics of exemplary leaders have been identified by various leadership scholars such as Kouzes and Posner as follows:
- Challenging the process: Leaders search for opportunities. They experiment challenging other people to go out of their comfort zones.
- Inspiring a shared vision: Leaders envision a new future and motivate others to join n that new direction.
- Enabling others to act: Leaders strengthen others and foster collaboration.
- Modelling the way: Leaders set the example for people by their own leadership behaviour and get the process moving.
- Encouraging the heart: Leaders recognise individual contributions and celebrate team success.
Leaders possess the following vital competencies to realize their leadership (Crainer, 2006):
- Management of attention: Having a vision that commands the attention and commitment of the followers
- Management of meaning: Cutting through complexity to frame issues in simple images and language
- Management of trust: Expressing a consistency of purpose
- Management of self: Being adept at identifying and fully utilising one’s own strengths and seeking to develop one’s own areas of weaknesses
Last, but not least, leadership requires an emotional spark of ethos. As Marshal Slim stated in his book “Defeat into Victory” that morale is a state of mind. This state of mind makes individuals feel they are part of something greater than themselves. It is based on the following foundations according to their importance: spiritual, intellectual and material. As only spiritual foundations can stand real strain spiritual foundations come first. Intellectual foundations come next as men are swayed by both reason and feeling. Finally comes the material one as the highest kind of morale is often met when the material conditions are lowest (Slim, 1956).
Finding this emotional spark of ethos might require the practice of leadership skills on its own. Leadership is a way of both living and thinking that are essential to deal with the uncertainties of our world.
